China

2011

New York, December 23, 2011 --- The Committee to Protect
Journalists condemns China's harsh sentencing of online journalist and activist
Chen Wei, who was handed a nine-year prison term on Friday for "inciting
subversion."

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In the next three months, users of China's microblog weibo.com --- "weibo" is the generic Chinese
term for Twitter-like platforms --- run by the huge sina.com (the English site is here) news
portal, entertainment and blogging site, will have to start providing their
real-world identities to the site, instead of simply being able to register. It
seems likely the users of competitor tencent.com (English here) will have to do
the same, though the government
hasn't made that clear in recent announcements, dating back to December 16.

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New York, December 14, 2011--The Committee to Protect
Journalists welcomes the release of jailed Chinese journalist Huang Jinqiu. The
journalist was freed on October 20, but delayed the announcement until Tuesday
because authorities had told him not to seek publicity at the time, according
to news reports.

For
the first time in more than a decade, China is not the world's worst jailer of
the press in CPJ's annual census of imprisoned journalists. Among the 27 jailed in China,
one group has seen a massive jump in imprisonments. In another first since CPJ
began taking its census, more than half of those behind bars for reporting in
China are ethnic Uighur or Tibetan. What's more, two Uighur journalists have
been unaccounted for since their scheduled 2011 release. The
lack of information available about these cases is added proof that they were
arrested to deprive their communities of a voice.

It's easy to use polarizing descriptions
of online news-gathering. It's the domain of citizen journalists, blogging without
pay and institutional support, or it's a sector filled with the digital works
of "mainstream media" facing financial worries and struggling to offer employees
the protection they once provided. But there is a growing middle ground:
trained reporters and editors who work exclusively online on projects born independent
of traditional media. They share many of the practices of an older generation
of reporters, but their work draws from the decentralized and agile practices of
the digital world.

China's latest media regulations,
issued Thursday in a bid to take some steam out of microblogs that increasingly
drive the country's news agenda, signal an increased role for the state in
drafting and enforcing press standards.

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Wednesday's
post, "Advice for colleagues on
the digital front lines," offered practical advice for keeping a website up and
running in a hostile political environment. But such measures
are not universally applicable. Sky Canaves, CPJ's new East Asia and Internet
consultant in Hong Kong, sent this reality check for Internet writers in China, where
tighter government scrutiny has driven online users to turn to other tactics.

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In the latest sign of increasing pressure on Chinese
companies to tighten control of the Internet, Chinese authorities convened an
unusual seminar in Beijing for senior executives of 39 major enterprises
involved in Internet services, technology and telecommunications.

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New York, October 31, 2011--The Committee to Protect
Journalists condemns the imprisonment of two Tibetan writers, one of whom was sentenced
after a year of detention without trial, according to reports.